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The Past Examined

IT IS NOT OFTEN that a social historian gets to watch social history march past his own window. But that was Prof. Leon F. Litwack's rare opportunity when the Free Speech Movement erupted at the University of California campus in Berkeley in 1964. With what he calls a ''certain kind of exhilaration,'' the historian watched as his students succeeded where his older generation of social activists had failed. He watched as Mario Savio exhorted his fellow students to challenge the authorities, to ''put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop.''

That day, in a way, might have been the formal beginning of the national political and cultural convulsion known as the 60's, now a jumble of memories, images of hippies, LSD, civil rights marches, Vietnam on nightly television, assassinations, antiwar demonstrations, tear gas.

Now Professor Litwack is a quarter-century older, and he teaches about the 60's as history to Mario Savio's academic heirs, Berkeley undergraduates who were not yet born at the time and who look on the era with a mixture of envy, fascination and suspicion. He is one of many scholars nationwide who have begun to focus on those tempestuous times that many consider a watershed in modern American history, a time that, for all its excesses, forever changed American social attitudes. New Courses Offered

They are delving into the underground press of the period, the origins of feminism and rock music, the influence of the civil rights and antiwar movements on the national leadership, and many other topics. By some accounts, hundreds of new courses on the 60's are now being offered in universities and colleges across the nation. And with the passage of healing time, the scholars are bringing a measure of objectivity that was perhaps impossible until now.

''We are beginning to see scholarly studies of the 60's - up to now it's just been memoirs,'' said Sheldon Hackney, a historian of the American South who is president of the University of Pennsylvania. Every spring Dr. Hackney teaches an honors seminar called ''The History of the 60's: Aberration or Watershed.'' For his students, whose first political awareness may have been the Iranian hostage crisis or the election of President Reagan, the 60's are as remote as they are difficult and perplexing to the scholars. ''The era lies in a gray area of history,'' observes Mr. Hackney. ''It's not yet fully in the textbooks; that why it's such an interesting course to teach. It's comparable to the Depression, because they were both watershed times -things were never the same afterward.''

Maintaining scholarly objectivity about the 60's is not easy, for the decade tore apart the American campus as much as it did the rest of the nation, leaving internal scars that may have lingered longer than external ones. Many of the leading scholars of the 60's were active participants in the movement, people like Todd Gitlin, now associate professor of sociology at Berkeley, then president of the militant Students for a Democratic Society and an organizer of anti-Vietnam War marches. His recent book, ''The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage,'' a heavily personal work, is meant, he writes, to stress the links of the period to what came before and after, to ''reclaim'' the decade from the ''big bang'' theory, that it arose from nothing and collapsed back into nothing.

''I think it is too early to study the 60's,'' argued the Berkeley sociologist Neil J. Smelser, who as a young faculty member during the Free Speech Movement in 1964 was called in by university authorities to help negotiate with students. ''The polarization is still with us. It comes through in agonized accounts like Gitlin's. The great reluctance to let go is one of the motifs here. It is going to be a while before we get scholarship that can be called good scholarship on the subject.''

A LEADING student of the writing of history, Prof. John Higham of the Johns Hopkins University history faculty, maintains that it is not premature to study the era, but that the quality of research has not yet measured up. ''The tendency is be very excited about recent history, but the work has been more of chronicle than complex causal analysis,'' he said. ''The scene is absolutely stuffed with facts. We don't have very good structures of interpretation yet for the 60's. We have the intensification of the civil rights movement, the counterculture. No one has any idea how they relate to each other.''

Another impediment is what William E. Leuchtenburg, a leading historian at the University of North Carolina, calls the ''visceral response'' to the 60's that still runs high among faculty members, particularly as young scholars reared in the period begin to dominate academic departments, clashing with senior faculty. ''So certain topics of the 60's are still touchy,'' he said. ''But that is no reason not to look at it.''

Indeed, the personal memories can hardly be erased, least of all for Richard Flacks, a sociology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and one of the leading scholars of the period. He was an early leader in the New Left and the S.D.S., and an antiwar activist. In May 1969, when he was a junior faculty member at the University of Chicago, a man came to his office purporting to interview him for a newspaper story. The visitor, whose identity and grievance was never learned, beat Professor Flacks on the head and arms with a crowbar, nearly severing his hand.

Despite this incident, which he assumes was politically motivated, he has attempted to approach his subject with scientific objectivity in a long-term study of the residue of the 60's.

He and Jack Whalen, a sociologist at the University of Oregon, have been studying the lives of former activists, tracing the fate of 18 students indicted and later acquitted on charges of burning a Bank of America branch near the Santa Barbara campus during student unrest in 1970. They have compared their lives with 15 other former students who were fraternity members and athletes, not activists. Though not entirely surprising, the results have been instructive. Years later, the former activists were somewhat mellowed and quieter, but nonetheless markedly different from their more conventional counterparts. Holding 'Value-Oriented' Jobs

They have tended, Professor Flacks found, to remain in ''value-oriented'' jobs, sacrificing careers, high income and families, resisting conformity and maintaining an ''experimental'' attitude toward life. Some were living subsistence lives; one worked as a driver for a food-bank network. The highest paid was a doctor, making $45,000 a year working in public health. By 1980 none had married or had children, though some did later. By contrast, the nonactivists were all in business, except for one who was a football coach at a military academy, and had incomes in the high five or low six figures. Conservative as youths, they had become still more so as adults.

Professor Flacks does not pretend that his survey portrays the full social legacy of the 60's. ''We picked people relatively at the far ends of the spectrum,'' he said. ''What remains largely unknown is what happens to people who felt some radicalization but who were not very active.'' The results are published in ''Beyond the Barricades: The Sixties Generation Grows Up.''

Achieving scholarly dispassion has been difficult for him. ''It is hard to get sufficient emotional distance,'' he said. ''I was frankly someone who was an involved partisan in the student movement. People know that. But we tried to get some distance, to get some understanding of the experience. The 60's movement began first among young people from educated, middle-class families. The parents were relatively politically concerned liberals. Afterwards, we can trace many of the currents of the 80's, such as the environmental movement, directly to people imbued with activism. So when we see the Jesse Jackson effort, that is a post-60's phenomenon, as is feminism. Many people in our study are examples of that. We are now about to have a new generation whose parents grew up in the 60's. If I am right, I expect to see more activism in the 90's.''

Another effort at scientific analysis of the roots of the 60's upheaval and its aftermath comes from Doug McAdam, a sociologist at the University of Arizona. He found a list of 556 people, mostly white college students from the North, who volunteered for ''Freedom Summer,'' a widespread black voter-registration effort mounted in Mississippi in 1964. Three of them, James E. Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael H. Schwerner, were kidnapped and murdered.

PROFESSOR McAdam tracked down hundreds of the volunteers to see how the summer's experience affected their lives and compared them with a group of other young people who had volunteered for the project but did not actually go to Mississippi. One of the participants in Mississippi was Mario Savio, later leader of the Berkeley campus uprising.

The results are striking. The volunteers who made the trip were today much more likely than the no-shows to be in ''helping'' professions like education, social service and law. They also earned less and were more likely to be working in the lowest-paid segment of a particular field, such as in poverty and consumer law rather than in corporate law. Professor McAdam's conclusion, published in his new book, ''Freedom Summer,'' is: ''The popular view would have us believe that the 60's radicals have accommodated, perhaps even embraced, the 80's life style. For those who climbed aboard the 60's wave late or whose commitment to it was not particularly strong, there may be some truth to this view. However, when applied to the volunteers, the popular account is demonstrably false.''

He argues, further, that ''the New Left lives on in contemporary America in the lives and political involvements of people like the Freedom Summer veterans. They are the keepers of the leftist flame, nurturing the ideological and organization remnants of what once was a proud and thriving movement.''

Not all take such a sanguine view of the movement, but the paper trail it left has provided much grist for scholars. Acquisitive librarians of the period had the foresight to save the movement's newspapers and screeds, and scholars are beginning to mine them. The University of California at Los Angeles keeps the International Collection of Underground Newspapers on Microfilm, 100 rolls of long-defunct periodicals. Other repositories are the University of Texas at Austin, the Bancroft Library at Berkeley and the State Historical Society in Madison, Wis., which has about 60 cartons of S.D.S. papers.

One of those digging into all this is Terry Anderson, associate professor of history at Texas A & M University, a 41-year-old former flower child who hitchhiked around the nation, hung out at Berkeley and lived on a houseboat in Sausalito. ''I knew that when I was going through that, someday I would have to write about it,'' he said.

Using the window of the underground press, he is trying to trace the history of the movement as it developed from civil rights to the free-speech and campus movement, to antiwar, women's liberation and later into environmentalism and consumerism. These are all issues, he argues, like many others, that came to the fore because they were long neglected in the post-World War II period. Professor Anderson views the 60's as a historic American milestone that ranks in importance with the Jacksonian period and the Depression.

His working hypothesis was that the movement, for all the general press's attention on its supposed leaders, was actually leaderless and fairly unorganized, concerned less about ideology than issues. His view is that, for all the conservative backlash now, ''the activists won,'' having permanently changed things for women, blacks, environmental protection, automobile safety and the like. ''It was not an aberration,'' he said.

Determining how much effect the antiwar crusade had is the academic task of Melvin Small, a historian and American foreign-policy specialist at Wayne State University in Detroit. Professor Small, a participant himself in the protest movement, teaches a popular course, ''The U.S. and the Vietnam Experience,'' and is author of a recent book, ''Johnson, Nixon and the Doves.'' His conclusion, from interviews with scores of former top Administration officials, is that the demonstrations had numerous small and large consequences for the prosecution of the war. In one case, he found that President Nixon in 1969 let expire an ultimatum to the North Vietnamese to intensify the war if they did not become more conciliatory, because of the upcoming national ''Vietnam Moratorium'' march on Washington that fall.

Still another approach comes from Jon Wiener, historian at the University of California at Irvine, author of ''Come Together: John Lennon in His Time'' and an S.D.S. member during his student days at Harvard. His interpretation is that, despite the general view of the 60's as a period of radical assertion and defeat of liberalism, it actually contained the seeds of conservative Republican politics, marked early by Barry Goldwater's campaign against Lyndon Johnson for President in 1964, that came to dominate two decades later with the rise of Ronald Reagan.

He is also studying how the movement altered the study of history itself, an issue of much contention within the profesison. ''Beginning in the 60's,'' Mr. Wiener said, ''history was transformed from a field that studied politics and diplomacy to one that studied history from the bottom up.'' He noted that a number of products of this ''new history'' had been elected as leaders of mainstream historical societies, including Natalie Zemon Davis of Princeton, a founder of the ''social history'' movement and a specialist in women's history, who was recently president of the American Historical Association.

It is against this backdrop that, by some counts, hundreds of undergraduate courses on the era have mushroomed on campuses from coast to coast. The courses have been enormously popular among the new student generation, for whom the period holds fascination. More than 900 students annually enroll at the University of California at Santa Barbara for Walter H. Capps's religion course on the impact of the Vietnam War on American society, in which Mr. Capps, who took part in 60's marches and was a pacifist, invites veterans and other firsthand participants in the war, such as Vietnamese refugees, to address the class. Cynics say the courses have been mounted to boost sagging enrollments in history and sociology departments. But Professor Small at Wayne State University, for one, argues that the motivation is deeper, that it helps faculty members resolve painful issues that tore at them during the period, when they had the power, by giving a failing grade to a student, to end his draft deferment and send him to possible death in Vietnam.

One of the more respected courses is Michael Zuckerman's spring lecture course called ''Splitting: The 1960's in America,'' which draws 250 students at the University of Pennsylvania. The readings are diverse; among them are William H. Whyte Jr.'s ''The Organization Man,'' President Eisenhower's farewell speech, President Kennedy's inaugural speech, the seminal S.D.S. Port Huron statement, Adam Smith's ''Money Game,'' Martin Lee's ''Acid Dreams,'' Hunter S. Thompson's ''Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'' and Marshall Frady's biography of George Wallace.

''I try to lay out a kind of social history of the 60's,'' explained Professor Zuckerman, a specialist in American family history. ''My pitch is the 50's culture pushed everyone toward the center. Then, as the title of the course says, you get a kind of spinning out to the extremes. What I try to resist is that the left dominated the 60's. The left came to a popularity that would have been undreamed of in the 50's, but so did the right. The disrespect for authority and refusal to honor American majesty and social leaders goes further and further in the 70's and 80's.'' In the final exam he often asks this question: ''When did the 60's end?''

THAT IS no easy question to answer, nor is it clear when the era began. Indeed, Prof.

Barbara L. Tischler, director the American Studies program at Barnard College in New York, teaches a weekly seminar to juniors and seniors titled ''America in the 1960's.'' But she defines the decades as the political, social, cultural and economic development between 1954 and 1974, the years between the Supreme Court school-desegregation decision and the resignation of President Nixon. ''Anything that happened in that time is fair game for discussion,'' she says.

Like other courses of its type, the Barnard course is enormously popular. Seventy Barnard and Columbia students signed up for the 17 places. Professor Tischler uses not only books but also film and other media to bring home the reality of the period, including a documentary featuring three Vietnam veterans, William D. Erhart, Jan Barry and Lamont B. Steptoe, reading their battlefield-influenced poetry. Class readings include Milton Viorst's ''Fire in the Streets'' and Stewart and Judith Albert's tract ''The 60's Papers.'' This is supplemented by such movies as ''American Graffiti,'' ''The Graduate'' and ''Easy Rider.'' According to the students, the course has given them an opportunity to reflect on the differences between their generation and that of the 60's, and it is an exercise in bewilderment and frustration for many. ''It doesn't seem we have 10 years in which to find ourselves as college students did in the 60's,'' said Jeffrey Rake, a Columbia senior. ''We don't have time to kid around like they did.'' Others said they felt betrayed by their peers today, for whom social awareness and political activities seem to take a back seat to preprofessional career preparation. Bitterness for the 60's

But there is also bitterness about their parents' generation. ''I've come out of this course feeling very down on the 60's generation - all those Yippies turning into yuppies,'' said Joshua M. Masur, a Columbia junior, referring to the Youth International Party of the 60's, whose members called themselves Yippies.

Meanwhile, a continent away in Berkeley, 700 undergraduates regularly congregate for Leon Litwack's hugely popular history course, ''American Society, 1865-1988.'' Toward the end of the semester he reaches the 60's, and the students watch in rapt attention as he shows a multimedia presentation of the period, titled ''To Look for America'' -reminiscent of a Simon and Garfunkel song popular in the late 60's.

Afterward the students are asked to comment on what they have seen, on their impressions of what happened on their campus when their parents were students. One wrote: ''The students back then seemed far more selfless than the students of today or any other period. So much so that they seemed not to care even about their own education, but only that things were being changed. They protested Vietnam because they truly opposed it and what the war stood for. Few of the protesters actually had to go. They were safe. They only cared because they truly thought it was wrong. Today students are much less selfless. The problem with the students of the 60's is that after a while, the students lost much of their selflessness. The ideals behind their protests became lost and soon they were only protesting for the sake of protesting.''

As they write, the students sit only yards from sunny Sproul Hall, where it all started. Where angry fists were raised a generation ago, students bake lazily in the sun between classes. But the 60's are not forgotten, at least at Berkeley. Says Professor Litwack, who witnessed history: ''They are fascinated with the 60's because they know very well where they are.''

Robert Reinhold is chief of The Times's Los Angeles bureau.

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